Set Up Provider Search
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the provider search capabilities in Provider Management.
- Explain how to set up provider search.
Get Started with Provider Search
To ensure constituents have access to specialized services when needed, government agencies recruit providers to build and manage a complex network. Due to outdated tools and systems, provider data often resides in spreadsheets, or, worse yet, paper documents. This makes it difficult for caseworkers to identify providers with certain attributes, such as their specialty, location, and availability.
Provider Management takes a very different approach to solve for these manual challenges. Using Provider Search, caseworkers can quickly explore the network based on desired criteria and then refine the results to pinpoint the most ideal service for the constituent. This search criteria maps to the data stored in the Provider Management objects.
Learn how Connor, the caseworker for the City of Cosville, uses Provider Search to assist his client, Steve Marshall. Steve recently lost his wife and needs grief counseling. To address this, Connor has added a Grief Counseling benefit assignment to Steve's care plan. Now, he needs to find a provider in Steve’s area who specializes in grief counseling sessions.
Connor navigates to Steve's care plan record and locates the Benefit Assignment related list, which displays all benefits assigned to Steve. Here, he finds the Grief Counseling benefit assignment. To initiate the search for a suitable provider, Connor clicks Search Providers.
This action opens the Provider Search page, where he can apply specific criteria, such as the Provider type, Care Specialty ID, and Benefit ID, or other values.
Here, Conor specifies an Onsite Service Provider with a care specialty ID of Counseling and Benefit ID of Grief Counseling.
The fields on the Benefit Provider Search screen are configured on the Benefit Provider Searchable Field object, which you’ll learn more about soon.
Connor clicks Search to find a list of providers that meet the criteria.
His search for a grief counseling provider yields two results: Cosville Grief Counseling Center and Grief Counselors of Cosville.
From the search results, you can apply filters to group and aggregate the results by certain criteria, such as specialty name, benefit name, or provider type. This is especially helpful if several providers meet the initial criteria. You can also select each provider and review their credentials, accreditations, facilities, any adverse actions, and lots of other important details about them before submitting the referral.
Connor knows that Steve has some mobility issues, so he decides to run the search again—this time selecting a maximum distance range of five miles from a relative location, in this case, Steve’s home.
After using Provider Search to apply the desired criteria, caseworkers can find one or more suitable providers. Next, they select a provider from the search results and click Create Referral to initiate the referral process through a guided flow.
In Connor's case, his additional criteria narrows down the list of providers to just one result: Cosville Grief Counseling Center.
With the ideal provider identified, Connor selects it and clicks Create Referral to launch the referral guided flow.
Now that Connor has found the right provider, he can create and submit a referral to connect Steve with the Cosville Grief Counseling Center. You'll learn more about creating and managing referrals in the next unit.
But first, take a closer look at how Provider Search works behind the scenes.
The Inner Workings of Provider Search
As you learned in the Provider Management Data Model with Public Sector Solutions module, provider data is stored across multiple data-model objects. These objects hold information about providers specialties, locations, availability, and more. Provider Search uses Data Processing Engine (DPE) to consolidate this information for faster, more efficient searches across the diverse data.
DPE is a powerful tool for defining data flows to process and transform data from various sources. In the context of Provider Search, the DPE definition specifies how provider data is combined into one searchable object called the Benefit Provider Searchable Field. This consolidation enables quick and efficient searches because all relevant provider data is accessible from one place.
To keep this data in the searchable object current, it’s important to periodically run the DPE definition. This process synchronizes the data in the Benefit Provider Searchable Field with the latest information stored in Provider Management objects.
The screen capture shows an example DPE with many nodes, all working together to consolidate data into the Benefit Provider Searchable Field object.
The DPE definition uses filters, joins, and formulas to transform the data contained in the source object.
To ensure caseworkers always have up-to-date provider information, create a flow to schedule the DPE definition to run automatically, at regular intervals.
Change the types of data stored in the searchable object by customizing the Benefit Provider Searchable Field or by creating your own searchable object configuration. In the configuration, map search criteria fields to picklist fields in the source objects so that caseworkers can use the fields as criteria on the search screen.
Public Sector Solutions includes an out-of-the-box searchable object configuration called Provider Search Searchable Object Configuration, shown in the next image.
In the Criteria Field Mapping area, the searchable object fields are mapped to picklist fields on source objects.
After setting up the searchable object configuration, you can define the search criteria configuration. While the searchable object configuration prepares the data for search by consolidating and structuring it, the following search criteria configuration defines the user experience.
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Define Search and Filter Fields: Specify which fields caseworkers can use to search for and filter providers, such as specialty, location, or availability.
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Set Search Result Columns: Choose which provider details appear in the search results to help caseworkers effectively compare options.
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Configure Grouping and Sorting Options: Determine how caseworkers can group and sort the search results to narrow down the information they need.
To help you get started, Public Sector Solutions gives you an out-of-the-box search criteria configuration called Provider Search with Create Referral Action.
Here’s a screenshot of the Benefit Provider Search with Create Referral Action configuration in Setup.
On this screen, you can select the fields for searching and filtering criteria, specify the fields that appear in the search results column, manage distance criteria, and more. You can also configure hyperlinks for the search result fields so that caseworkers can quickly open a record from the results.
This configuration includes the Create Referral action, which caseworkers can use to launch a referral from the search results. You can configure additional actions on a search criteria configuration to launch a flow, Omniscript, or Lightning web component.
To learn more about these Provider Search prerequisites and configuration steps, see the Provider Search article in Salesforce Help.
You’ve now learned how Provider Search empowers caseworkers to quickly identify the right provider for a constituent. After the caseworker finds one or more providers that are right for the constituent, they can use a guided flow to expedite the referral, which you’ll learn about in the next unit.